Muscle Loss – Frantic Shanti

In my last post, I whined about the repercussions of taking aromatase inhibitors (in my case, letrozole) as a way to diminish the amount of estrogen in my body, for the purpose of reducing the risk of breast cancer recurrence.

While I also mentioned letrozole’s effects on my exercise habits, in this post I wanted to drill down on one aspect in particular: muscle loss.

Before I go further, I need to add a disclaimer. Since the time the first photo was taken (the morning before my first chemo infusion), three and a half years passed and I went through menopause. Notably, the menopause was pharmaceutically-driven, starting with tamoxifen and then, after my hormone levels were low enough, continuing with letrozole. However, my body now is dealing with the same aging effects as someone who had transitioned naturally.

Except that my transition came before its time.

The below photo is from April 27, 2017, before I headed to the infusion center for my first dose of chemo. I had been training as normally as I could, under the conditions of lumpectomy and port placement that I wrote about here, and finding work-arounds for exercises that I’d been told not to do.

This is my 51-year-old biceps muscle, before I started the pharmaceutical portion of my breast cancer treatment.

While I lost some size and strength throughout my chemo infusions (here are all the photos), I was able to bounce back and had a particularly strong 2018 (sorry, don’t have good photos of that). But as the endocrine therapy with tamoxifen continued in 2019, to be replaced by letrozole in 2020, I could feel the effects of low estrogen.

On December 11, 2020, I struck the same pose again for sake of comparison.

Is something missing? This is my 54-year-old biceps muscle, struggling to keep up. Note: I am still working out as hard as I can!

As far as muscle appearance is concerned, I have experienced a slow downhill slide. My shoulder is not as peak-y, the biceps itself has decreased in size and I even find it more difficult to hold this muscular contraction. In addition, there’s more looseness in my skin, particularly at the back of my arm, which in part may be due to loss of collagen, also affected by estrogen levels (nice dermatological review by Shah & Maibach, 2001, Am J Clin Dermatol).

I’m busting my butt trying to increase the amount that I’m lifting, but I’m not making progress. Not surprisingly, the decrease in estrogen plays a role in this. As stated by Chidi-Ogbolu & Baar (2019, Front Physiol), “estrogen improves muscle mass and strength, and increases the collagen content of connective tissues”.

It makes sense then that lack of estrogen is going to be detrimental to maintaining muscle. To that point, Kitajima & Ono (2016, J Endocrinol), working with animal models, have found that “estrogen insufficiency leads to muscle atrophy and decreased muscle strength of female mice.”

Not just mice, obviously.

This information comes as no surprise to any woman who’s gone through menopause, I’m sure. But the experience of being slammed through menopause instead of having the opportunity to transition more gradually is yet another frustrating way that having cancer pulls the rug out from under you and reminds you that you are not in control of your life.

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Slowly, yoga is becoming more important in my life and my view of fitness is changing. Good thing too, since I can’t keep beating myself up like this.

Chemo drugs, that is.

Say “chemo patient” and people think of a hairless, skeletal person who could be blown down by a gentle breeze. But is that really what happens?

I was anxious about how much chemo was going to ravage me, so I decided to document everything. That way when treatment was over, I would know how much work I had to do to rebuild myself. The simplest way for me to do this was to photograph my right biceps. The cancer was on my left side and I had not been using that arm as much, so the right arm would provide a more accurate view of what chemo treatment was doing to lean mass.

I hope you’ll forgive the following photos. It was never my intention to actually post these (or else I would have chosen a better background!). The cropping is a bit off and I’ve only now realized that even my biceps curl isn’t consistent throughout all the photos. In my defense, I was focused on getting through treatment, and worrying about getting the angles and lighting right was the last thing on my mind. All these pics were taken on the mornings of my infusion days.

Infusion 1 – 4/27/2017:

Infusion 2 – 5/18/2017:

Infusion 3 – 6/8/2017:

Infusion 4 – 6/29/2017:

Infusion 5 – 7/20/2017:

Infusion 6 – 8/10/2017:

Is there a difference? I think there is, even with the relatively crappy and inconsistent photos. I also think that hanging towels over the door makes the bathroom look messy. And, YEOW, I am mole-y!

Six courses of chemo (Taxotere and Carboplatin), one every three weeks, won’t destroy you, although the drugs do smack you around a lot. It would take about a week or so to recover following each infusion, at which point I could work out again. As the infusions went on, the recovery time increased.

So, no, my chemo regimen didn’t turn me into a skeleton, although my weight did take a hit; there were times that I was literally too tired to eat or my GI tract hadn’t fully recovered, making it tough to get food down. Because my infusions were spread out, I got a pretty hefty dose. But women whose cancer dictates weekly infusions, while possibly receiving smaller doses, don’t get the same amount of time to recover and the treatment effects build up. In that sense, I was very fortunate, and that made it possible to maintain my strength.

Once again, my worst fears weren’t realized. It took time to get back to feeling normal and training hard again, but I got there.

Tag: Muscle Loss

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